I Shall Be Miserable If I Have Not An Excellent Library

Intimacy

By Lauren Groff

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Sometimes, I just don’t have anything to say about a book.

This isn’t because the book is bad, necessarily. On the contrary, some books which are considered Great Books have left me shrugging in this way, with a complete lack of comment. I felt this way when I read ‘The Adventures of Augie March‘ by Saul Bellow, and ‘Neuromancer‘ by William Gibson, and ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being‘ by Milan Kundera (that last one is obviously a joke – I HATED ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’).

And that’s sort of how I feel about ‘Fates and Furies‘: like, ‘Well, that was a book’. I liked it, actually (I think); I read it quickly, with pleasure. I just don’t have anything to say about it.

‘Fates and Furies‘ is the story of a marriage. It is a marriage joined in youth, impetuously, by two badly damaged and beautiful young people right after they graduate from college. The first half of the book is the story of their married life from the point of view of the husband, Lotto (short for Lancelot) Satterwhite, failed actor turned successful playwright, as he adores, fears, and chases his wife through their decades of marriage.

The second half of the novel is told from the point of view of his wife, Mathilde, after Lotto’s sudden death in his forties. Her widowhood sends Mathilde, now without an anchor, reeling into fury and despair, and through her flashbacks we learn how Lotto’s wife saw their marriage. In a sense, we learn what really happened.

Of course, that’s the whole point: in a marriage, as in any human relationship, there is no “what really happened” – there are only the beliefs of the participants and the witnesses. There may be a provable fact here and there, but these matter so much less than you would think, certainly less than you would hope. In the end, our own experience is king, and ‘Fates and Furies‘ is about how discordant that experience can be even in the most “successful” marriage.

Which, of course, is all very true, and well-worn literary territory, and Groff does it nicely, and I just don’t have a ton more to say about it. It’s a good read; it’s compelling. You’re interested in these people, at least while you’re with them, but I doubt that I’ll be thinking about Lotto and Mathilde again. ‘Fates and Furies‘ isn’t the first novel (and won’t be the last) to tell me that love and understanding are two different things, and that all love is, in a way, narcissism, but that it is no less necessary for that.

Maybe it’s just because I’m so cynical by nature, but I just don’t find novels about what an emotional sham marriage is to be at all scandalous, pleasingly or otherwise. We get it, don’t we? We’re all strangers to each other, in the end. This path is so well trod by now that I really can’t muster even the most banal observations about it.

However, it seems as though I am the only one with nothing to say about ‘Fates and Furies‘. Nothing to say, and, in fact, two years too late to say it. Apparently, ‘Fates and Furies’ was the book to read in 2015.

“Not only has Groff’s novel, by the Wall Street Journal’s count, landed on more US year-end best-of lists than any other work of fiction, but Amazon has made it official, stamping its endorsement on Fates and Furies as the retailer’s book of the year. The cherry on the top came from Barack Obama, who earlier this month told People magazine he liked Fates and Furies more than anything else he’d read in 2015.”

Really? Huh. More than anything else?

The Guardian offered this explanation for the book’s wild success:

Lauren Groff

“On the surface, this premise echoes the familiar observation that even two people who live together intimately can end up feeling they hardly know each other. Given that most fiction is read by women, and that the purchase of a hardcover novel suggests a certain midlife affluence, it’s hardly surprising that so many book buyers would find this theme arresting and easy to relate to. They are at that point in life when they realise that a wedding is less the end of a fairytale than the beginning of a mystery, and sometimes an ugly one.”

Well, I may not have much to say about ‘Fates and Furies’ itself, but I have a lot to say about that.

First of all, I don’t think that ‘Fates and Furies‘ is about the fact that two people who live together intimately can end up feeling they hardly know each other; I think it’s about the fact that two people who live together can feel that they know each other intimately and be completely wrong about that. What is askew between Lotto and Mathilde is not known to them. We are aware of the discrepancy in their understandings of their marriage, but they are not (Lotto, in particular, is not; Mathilde is a much murkier and more complicated figure).

Second, I do not think that women have special access to the distances and alienations of marriage, that they experience a special loneliness that men do not feel. Or, perhaps, to be more precise, I suspect that men must have their own loneliness, the equal counterpart of woman’s, and that a book about alienation would therefore be of interest to them as well.

Third, I do wish people would stop insisting that women are all in for fairytale marriages. It makes us all sound stupid, girlish and naive. Women are capable of being perfectly clear-eyed about marriage, certainly just as much as men are, and people should stop speaking about women’s marital expectations as though they were necessarily childish.

Often, when books make big, cultural splashes, it tells us more about the culture than the book. Certainly, ‘Fates and Furies‘ is a very competent novel of its kind – I do not feel that I wasted my time reading it. Grim, well-executed novels of bourgeois marriage are always enjoyable, in their way. But the frenzy around it says more about us than about ‘Fates and Furies’, I think. Maybe, at a time when we are feeling more and more alienated, novels which are about alienation even in the most intimate spaces will mesmerize and frighten us.

Or maybe I’m missing something. Maybe the desire to be really, totally, perfectly known by the person that loves you is what people expect from marriage; perhaps perfect intimacy is a dream cherished by hearts more romantic than mine (which would be most hearts). And perhaps those romantic hearts are the ones that catapulted ‘Fates and Furies‘ to the tops of the bestseller lists. Perhaps they did not find it, as I did, obvious. Perhaps, to the romantic heart, ‘Fates and Furies’ is, in fact, a terrifying debunking of our last true fairytale.

Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

By Esther Perel

I shouldn’t even have read it. I don’t like self-help books, and I don’t like books written by therapists, and I don’t like people who use the word ‘erotic’ – this obviously wasn’t the book for me.

But my mother gave it to me (which is worrisome in of itself, and I am not going to unpack it here) and asked me what I thought, and it’s just a short little book and I figured: eh, how bad can it be? Just blow through it, tell Mom what’s what, move on.

I was right about one thing: it is short. But since it was excruciating to read, it didn’t feel short. And since (as I have mentioned before) I have a rule about finishing books once I’ve started them, I couldn’t move on once I’d begun, and so I became sort of mired in ‘Mating in Captivity‘, (captive to it, if you will) thrashing and miserable and unable to get free.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that ‘Mating in Captivity‘ isn’t about sex – it’s about intimacy. This is a book about relationships, about how to maintain a sexual connection in the context of a long-term relationship. But it isn’t exactly a self-help book. It’s more a series of case studies: different couples, the way in which their sex life is guttering, the advice that she gave that couple, why she gave it. How she understands the problem, why she believes that problem arises.

Now, I really hate talking about intimacy. Not sex – I love talking about sex. But talking about intimacy makes me uncomfortable. And, yes, I am aware that makes me a poor audience for this book (or perhaps the perfect audience, hard to say). And, yes, I went in skeptical – I did not have an open mind. I tried, but when I know that intimacy is going to be the subject, people talking about feelings and connecting and closeness, then I just cringe away instinctively.

This is the image of Esther Perel from her book jacket, and, you have to admit, she looks super cool.

Let’s start with the positive: ‘Mating in Captivity‘ is probably not a bad book. And Perel is probably a great therapist. She comes across as wise, and gentle, unjudgmental but also unfoolish. She managed to write an entire book about sex and intimacy without once making me wonder what her own sex life is like, and that’s a serious accomplishment. In fact, that’s a major therapeutic credential, and I’m honestly impressed.

I’ll also say this: she is open-minded about decisions, mistakes, and lifestyle choices which other therapists would pathologize, and I’ll bet that makes her a more effective counselor for struggling couples.

The book is clear and well-organized. The argument is lucid and evenly applied. I’ve never read any book in this genre at all, so I can’t say whether the thinking is totally novel, but I can say it is not conventional, and it’s probably often useful.

But I hated it. I hated it a lot.

First of all, I hated the narrative voice. Perel adopts a tone which is confidential and sexy: part cool aunt, part girlfriend, part romance novelist. I feel almost bad dinging her for this, because I think I know why she’s doing it: one of the projects of her book is to remind people that sex is supposed to be fun, and so she tries to inject that fun into her language. But you can’t force fun. Maybe it works well in person, but on the page, you sound like you’re trying too hard. Her writing bristles with flirtatious little locutions:

Language like this feels self-conscious to me; it makes me wince. When I feel as though she’s trying to spice up her prose like this, I pull away from the argument. Forget intimacy – this kind of language makes me want to avoid sex.

But, if we’re being completely honest, the more fundamental problem is that I don’t buy into the project of this book. I don’t really understand, having read it, what it was meant to accomplish. Was it supposed to help couples who are having problems like these? Are you supposed to identify a couple whose problems resemble your own, and then take the advice given to them? Are you meant to sort of wallow in the general, intimate atmosphere of the book, picking up good tips for relationship hygiene? Was it meant to get a conversation going, encourage people to think about their own relationships a little bit more?

I don’t think intimacy works this way. It’s not that I’m a therapy-skeptic, not at all. On the contrary, I believe that therapy, including couples therapy, can really help people. I’m just not convinced that reading about other peoples‘ couples therapy is as helpful. And so this books starts to feel like Perel just…musing about relationships, laying out her general ideas about how intimate couples should and do work.

And, while she is a licensed and practicing couples therapist, I’m not sure why I’m reading that book. While I agree with her basic values, and each chapter is coherent, I don’t feel like I really know anything now that I didn’t know before. She is not presenting a unified theory of intimacy, and she is discussing the problems of a very narrow slice of the population. This is a book about the normal marital depressions that affect the affluent, via specific case studies of people who are often quite obnoxious, and I wouldn’t have read that book if I had known what it was.

I really want to give Perel credit where she is due it: despite the fact that I think most of her advice is generic, on some things she is unusually open-minded, and these chapters are the most interesting. Her stance on infidelity, which is pretty radically unjudgmental, is the best example of this, and, because she isn’t spending time blaming anyone for adultery or adulterous urges, she manages to write about those things with genuine wisdom and humanity. And the things she says about them are interesting; I have not read them before, and I have not thought about them that way before.

(It’s also worth noting: I was apparently not the only person who thought that Perel was at her best when writing about infidelity. Someone at Harper must have agreed with me, because her next book, which I have not read, is called ‘The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity‘. I would actually, despite my aversive reaction to ‘Mating in Captivity‘, be kind of interested to read this book, which is probably the best recommendation that I can give Perel).

I think that my conclusion is this: given that the subject matter makes me want to jump out of my own skin, and that I don’t really endorse the project, it would have been a mistake for me to expect to enjoy this book. The best that Perel was going to get out of me was a grudging respect, and this she did get. Probably a great read for anyone who likes reading about relational difficulties, but for the intimacy-avoidant among us, ‘Mating in Captivity‘ should be avoided.